Liberals

Meditation on Aging

Such amazement
at where his days went!

Juleigh Howard-Hobson, Cascadia, USA

Martyr’s Imperative

I
Die.

Amy Foreman, Cascabel, Arizona

To My Children, on Winning

Don’t shun
The one
Outdone,
My son.

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Now I have to give Ben my advice on winning, since he beat out his brother and sister as well as me, his mom: “Don’t shun the one outdone, my son!” 😉 Thanks, SCP . . . this was a fun experience for him!

I felt your poem, though terse, was too short and said nothing. I really believe that “Meditation on Aging” was the best, better than even Count Leopold Yankevich’s attempts. But we had only one competent judge, Dr Joseph Salemi.

The “Homeric Hymns” were not called by that name because they were ever assumed to have been written by Homer[*]

Rather the name uses the purely adjectival sense of the term “Homeric”; that is they were written in the “Homeric” style. E.g. they employ dactylic hexameter; they were written in the same dialect as “The Illiad” and “The Odyssey”; etc.

(In a similar way, the use of the formal descriptions “Shakespearean Sonnets” or “Petrarchian Sonnets” is not meant to imply that they were actual written by those authors.)

A valid point. I didn’t really intend my little poem to be taken so seriously. According to the Wikipedia article on the Homeric Hymns, some writers in antiquity (the article specifically cites Thucydides) did “uncritically attribute” the poems to Homer. I am by no means an expert on the matter, and of course a Wikipedia article by no means settles it. Certainly no one today believes they were written by Homer (as you say, assuming there was a Homer), and the way people use the term today is undoubtedly in the sense to which you refer. So thank you for pointing that out.

Right. Likewise I apologize if I sounded overly-snarky; that wasn’t my intent. I just thought it was an interesting point worth mentioning. (Sadly, sometimes it’s hard to suppress the effects of the pedantry gene. 😉 )

Thank you, Leo, for your appreciation. It has permitted me to go to your web-site. If you would, I would gladly substitute the $100 for the volume of your own poetry that you consider most exemplary… Once again, thanks.